High-speed video reveals how honey bee stingers pump venom | Hacker News Reader

High-speed video reveals how honey bee stingers pump venom

arstechnica.com

50 pointsgumby21 comments

The best method for dealing with honeybee stings is to use a credit card (or your finger nail, knife, &c) to "shave" the stinger flush with the skin. This separates the two barbsaws (from the poison-pumping motor action) reducing chemical embedding of poison (and physical barbs).

–retired hobbyist beekeeper

> Honey bees are known to leave their stingers embedded in tender flesh once they sting you and fly away

This is an accident of our physiology as honey bees sting other species multiple times, just like a wasp can to us. They don’t except to rip in half or end their life when they sting us. This is not an adaptation specifically ensuring group survival, it is a tragedy exclusive to encountering mammals near the hive.

But their stingers are barbed, unlike wasp stingers and other stinger types which are smooth. Barbed stingers seem specifically designed to lodge in elastic skin (that is, skin of a larger vertebrate, not simply mammals) and a barbed stinger can also be more effective at delivering venom, pumping long after the bee itself has disengaged and slunk away.

I don't see how you can call it an "accident" if it's a simple fact that barbed stingers are well-adapted to lodge in the skin of larger victims and stick around and increase efficacy of the attack.

Worker bees themselves are disposable. If we consider an entire hive as the organism, rather than the component bees, we can easily see how the loss of several workers to loss-of-stinger attacks is beneficial to the entire organism, and it really does enhanced survival of the group, or the organism itself, if you will.

> we can easily see how the loss of several workers to loss-of-stinger attacks is beneficial to the entire organism

We can't easily see it, especially if on the other hand you have a design that requires no losses. And it's not always "several", especially with bigger predators

If you think that's bad, consider how they mate. A honeybee drone mates with a queen in flight, and when he disengages with the queen his endophallus will be ripped off, killing the drone.

Bee colonies have normally much more workers than wasp colonies, so losing some workers is much more affordable than for a wasp colony.

This explains why colonial wasps still retain the smooth stinger of the solitary wasps.

Moreover, many wasps have a larger size, allowing them to inject more venom in a short time, so there is less need for them to develop such a stinging method like in bees, which is suitable for colonies with a much greater number of smaller workers.

But not losing workers is even more affordable, so this doesn't explain it!

But you are missing the inherent trade-off.

The barbed stinger becomes difficult to dislodge, and it delivers maximal venom, with the obvious cost of the owner’s life.

The smooth stingers cannot promise this maxxing, but they spare the owners.

So, what will evolution select for, maximal assured damage, or better survival rates? Can’t have both. It’s am intrinsic trade-off. That’s why.

I'm not missing the trade-off, I'm rejecting yours as the only or even the most-important one.

Alternative would be:

  - multiple stings are more effective since they add physical damage, have a higher chance of targetting something more delicate. And that's also delivered in a shorter period of time by an active bee rather than having to hope the attached sack continues to deliver.  As you said yourself "allowing them to inject more venom in a short time"

  - also, have you factored in the chance that post-death venom sack can be removed and thus doesn't deliver max venom? "barbed stingers cannot promise the maxxing"

  - loss of productive capacity of the worker lowers survival rates of the hive.
 bring more pain and have a higher chance of 

  - you could get better poison instead

So, again, "We can't easily see it", it's a tough intricate question you can't resolve theoretically or even post-hoc rationalize that whatever exists is optimal since there might have been other factors blocking the better design

the barb doesn’t stick in other organisms that they sting, and still delivers venom

the disposable worker is not disposed and continues working

> the barb doesn’t stick in other organisms

I don't think it disproves "honeybee barbs are adaptive against mammals", for example:

1. It may not be adaptive for honeybees to self-sacrifice against smaller targets. The full venom dose could be overkill, or it may be better to have multiple tries or engage multiple foes.

2. Perhaps it's just harder to evolve a good barb against smaller targets or ones with different surfaces/material.

3. Would smaller/different barbs increase the risk of damaging "accidents"?

It seems safe to assume there are evolutionary pressures around stinger-design, especially when we consider that queens of the same species do not have the same barbs.

workers don’t have genetic contributions to pass on

Its simply a mutation that is merely not selected against, as there are enough workers to ensure hive reproduction, but the specific barb mutation happens to be inferior to a wasp’s but only when mammals are around

they make do with it, a stuck stinger injects more venom and a ripped apart bee gives out a distress hormone attracting other bees

but…. so does a wasp.

it doesn’t even prevent hive destruction from a large persistent mammal

so, its okay to feel empathy.

if the bee has conscious behavior, they do not sting expecting their own death. they expected to go back home to their hive family and mammal skin is an unexpected death trap. the way bee stinging choices are written about is mammal centered and inaccurate.

> workers don’t have genetic contributions to pass on

Oh come on man, that's as old as Darwin. Your brain-neurons will die without passing on their genetic payload too, yet somehow (sarcasm) they keep mattering every generation.

address the actual argument if you have a moment

I already did, insofar as there seemed to be one. You said that the features of the workers don't really matter, because there's little selection pressure for them, because they're sterile and don't pass on genes.

That's ridiculous, because kin-selection is a thing, worker-features do affect what genes get passed on, and honeybees have been textbook example for at least your entire lifetime.

Whenever the barb doesn't stick, what purpose is it serving?

The same as a wasp

> This is an accident of our physiology

Is this the view of any well-regarded entomologist?

Given smooth stingers exist, and given the pump mechanism is self contained within the stinger, it seems more likely that this was evolved to deliver higher doses of venom to vertebrates.

or its a happenstance mutation thats merely not selected against with bees dying unexpectedly from their own defensive actions

If given the right environment (block the wind etc), often bees will unwind their stinger from a human.

Beautiful.

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